characters taught in class
3.19 1.17 3.36 1.08 2.92 1.11
type characters in a computer instead of handwriting them
2.27 1.06 2.56 1.13 2.53 1.22
read characters but not handwrite them
2.24 1.05 2.77 1.15 3.14 1.17
write words only in Pinyin instead of in characters
1.67 .86 2.22 .99 3.50 1.17
communicate orally only, without any writing tasks (characters or Pinyin)
1.70 .96 2.14 1.12 2.71 1.32
Table 4.26 Mean Differences of the Requirement of Characters Among Three Student Groups
Reason Two Groups
Mean Difference
95% CI
LL UL p
handwrite all characters taught in class
Group 1 -Group 2 .49* .27 .71 .000 Group 1 - Group 3 1.67* 1.43 1.91 .000 Group 2 - Group 3 1.18 .89 1.47 .000 handwrite only some of the
characters taught in class
Group 1 - Group 2 -.17 -.41 .06 .187 Group 1 - Group 3 .27* .01 .52 .041 Group 2 - Group 3 .44* .13 .75 .003 type characters in a computer
instead of handwriting them
Group 1 - Group 2 -.29* -.51 -.07 .006 Group 1 - Group 3 -.25* -.50 -.01 .043 Group 2 - Group 3 .04 -.26 .34 .951 read characters but not handwrite
them
Group 1 - Group 2 -.53* -.75 -.31 .000 Group 1 - Group 3 -.91* -1.15 -.66 .000 Group 2 - Group 3 -.37* -.67 -.08 .009 write words only in Pinyin
instead of in characters
Group 1 - Group 2 -.55* -.74 -.36 .000 Group 1 - Group 3 -1.83* -2.04 -1.62 .000 Group 2 - Group 3 -1.28* -1.53 -1.02 .000 communicate orally only,
without any writing tasks (characters or Pinyin)
Group 1 - Group 2 -.44* -.66 -.23 .000 Group 1 - Group 3 -1.01* -1.25 -.77 .000 Group 2 - Group 3 -.57* -.85 -.28 .000
Note. CI = confidence interval; LL = lower limit; UL = upper limit.
Difference Between Teachers’ and Students’ Beliefs about the Requirement of Characters
Table 4.27 presents the mean and standard deviations by teachers and students for all six requirements of characters in the first-semester CFL class. An independent t-test was conducted to see if teachers and students differ on any mean. As shown in the table, statistical mean
differences are found on all statements except the fourth one, read characters but not handwrite them. Significant differences of the other means show that students agreed more with the first requirement of handwrite all characters taught in class, whereas teachers agreed more with the second requirement of handwrite only some of the characters taught in class. For the other three statements where teachers and students statistically differed, all means are below 3, indicating that basically both teachers and students did not agree with them.
Table 4.27 Requirementof Characters by Teachers and Students Teacher (n = 192) Student (n = 914) Cohen’s d Role of Characters M SD M SD t p
handwrite all characters taught in class 3.11 1.35 3.44 1.23 -3.32* .001 .26 handwrite only some of the characters taught in class 3.60 1.22 3.18 1.15 4.55* .000 .35 type characters in a computer instead of handwriting them 2.56 1.17 2.37 1.11 2.09* .037 .17
read characters but not handwrite them 2.42 1.12 2.48 1.14 -.64 .526 .05
write words only in Pinyin instead of in characters 1.81 1.04 2.05 1.14 -2.64* .008 .22 communicate orally only, without any writing tasks (characters or Pinyin) 1.64 .95 1.93 1.12 -3.81* .000 .28 * p < .05.
Qualitative Results
This section reports results from the analysis of interviews with Chinese teachers and students in the DCI and ICI program. Interview results from both teachers and students in the DCI program are presented first and the second section introduces results from the ICI program.
Results from the DCI Program
As introduced in Chapter Three (methodology), two Chinese teachers (Dr. Zhang and Dr. Mei) and twelve students from the DCI program participated in the interview. Among the twelve students, six were from the first-semester course and the other six were from the second-semester course. All six second-semester students were from Dr. Mei’s class. Three first-semester students were taught by Dr. Zhang and the other three first-semester students were taught by another Chinese teacher who did not participate in the interview. Below I first report results from the interviews with the two teachers and then report results from the interviews with the twelve students. Unlike the format of the quantitative results which were reported according to four main research questions, results of qualitative data are not structured according to each research question. Rather, since participants revealed more information on some aspects but less or even no information for other aspects, this section focuses on major themes only.
Results from Teachers in the DCI Program
Results from the two teachers in the DCI program address the second research question that focuses on the rationales of adopting the DCI timing structure. Regarding the belief about the timing structure and the rationale, Dr. Zhang expressed more opinions than Dr. Mei, perhaps because Dr. Zhang was the program director and Dr. Mei had only recently joined the program. As expected, Dr. Zhang fully supported the DCI instructional model since he, as the program
director, designed and developed the curriculum that centered on the DCI approach. However, it is rather important to pay attention to how and why Dr. Zhang came up with DCI. Dr. Zhang joined the current CFL program in fall 2006. Before then, he had taught Chinese at three other institutions in the northern U.S. and he was the first to build a CFL program at two of them. He revealed in the interview that he did not adopt or even think about the DCI timing structure while he was teaching at those three institutions. Even in the first year of teaching in the current
program from fall 2006 to spring 2007, he did not use the DCI approach. That means, he
continued to teach all four skills, speaking, listening, reading, and writing plus culture just as he had done before in the previous three programs.
When asked about why he made a change in the second year, he provided three major reasons. First, he observed that students performed poorly when they had to learn both Pinyin and characters. Following are his words:
发现的问题是，学生觉得顾此失彼，因为学拼音又学汉字，这样的话，你必然要求
学生又要掌握汉字，又要掌握拼音，那么，头一天是拼音quiz, 第二天是character
quiz，学生被弄得乱七八糟，顾此失彼。 [The problem I found was, students could
not grasp all aspects of learning at the same time, because when both Pinyin and characters were taught, students definitely needed to master characters, and at the same time, they were also required to learn Pinyin, as a result, one day the quiz is in Pinyin and the next day the quiz is in characters, students get messy and lost in one aspect or the other.] (Interview, December 23, 2010)
It can be seen that Dr. Zhang concluded from his first-year teaching experience in the current program that it is too much to require students to learn speaking and listening in Pinyin and reading and writing in characters plus culture at the same time in the first semester. Thus, Dr.
Zhang suggested a trade-off by asking students to focus on using Pinyin to practice speaking and listening first. He further revealed in the interview that he found it more effective to focus on speaking and listening and then to transition to reading and writing later. One piece of evidence he pointed out was that at the end of the first-semester class, he usually asked students to perform a short comedy. According to his observation, his current students performed better than his former students in the same program.
The second reason was related to the frequency and the total hours of CFL courses taught per week. In the DCI program, each CFL course was taught only twice a week for 1.25 hours a day. Dr. Zhang commented that, when classes were taught so infrequently, students could easily forget what they had learned the previous day. Although it seemed like students had many days in between, he sadly emphasized that he could not give students too much homework due to the reality that students had other classes to take care and most of them also had to work. In
comparison, the three institutions where he had taught before offered more credit hours (either four or five credits) for CFL courses which means that CFL courses were taught four or five days a week. This way, students could learn Pinyin one day and characters the next day and repeatedly enhance the learning of both. That is why Dr. Zhang did not think of DCI before. It was this particular feature of his current program (i.e., the number of days CFL courses meet per week) that pushed him to seek an alternative instructional model.
Last but not least, he pointed out that drop-out rates previously had been very high. He said that he used to have about six students who dropped out in the middle of the first-semester class, but since he adopted the new timing structure, fewer students dropped out of class. Furthermore, he also had an overall more stable enrollment because students were more willing to continue to study at the next level when they had a better grasp of speaking and listening skills
and, thus, more confidence to learn Chinese. He emphasized that he did notice great
improvements in the enrollment of the second-semester CFL course, which could also be seen from the fast growth of his program since the time he adopted the DCI timing structure.
The second CFL professor, Dr. Mei, joined the DCI program in fall 2010. Before that semester, Dr. Mei taught in a private university in the northern U.S. for two years. Since she had recently joined the DCI program, she was still in the process of adapting to the current structure. Therefore, she did not comment much about the current DCI timing structure, rather, she talked more about her teaching in the previous program. In her previous CFL program, she said characters were taught from the beginning of the first semester. However, before the middle of the first semester students were only required to read but not write characters. When asked about an ideal structure for teaching characters in the current program, she did not give a specific timing structure but just emphasized that it mostly depended on students.
Regarding the factor of student body, Dr. Mei noted that students in the current program were quite different from her previous students. Specifically, her previous students were much more motivated and studied harder because, she assumed, it was a private university and students paid high tuition fees. According to Dr. Mei, this group of students did not need to find
employment to support their studies and could more fully focus on their academic subjects. In contrast, she reported that her current students seemed less motivated and most of them did not have much time to study because they had to be employed. Thus, she admitted that she
constantly lowered the standards of requirements for her current students. Therefore, like Dr. Zhang, Dr. Mei also slowly came to realize and face the reality of the current program and study body.
Results from Students in the DCI Program
Results from students in the DCI program address all four research questions. Students varied in their beliefs and rationales of the timing structure to introduce characters. Six students who were in the first-semester CFL course did not have an opportunity to learn characters in the class. It is reasonable they might not have a clear idea of when they preferred to learn characters. Therefore, I was careful to situate the questions within the context of how important and difficult different skills were for them and asked what if question about the timing structure. For example, I asked “What would you think if characters were also taught in this class?”
In general, most students said they considered speaking and listening to be the most important skills. At the same time, they also thought speaking and listening were difficult. Only one student mentioned the importance of reading characters for the purpose of being able to recognize certain characters when he has an opportunity to visit China at some point in the future. Though he considered the ability to read characters to be important, he still immediately added that writing characters would be unnecessary. This result suggested that even though most of the first-semester class time was spent on speaking and listening, students still found these two skills to be difficult to learn. The major difficulty of speaking and listening, according to students, were tones and the speech speed of L1 Chinese speakers.
In terms of the timing structure and rationale, results showed that five of the six first- semester students wanted to delay teaching characters and one of them said maybe. The sixth student was undecided on this point. The five students who preferred the DCI timing structure mentioned that characters were difficult and it was important to establish a solid foundation in speaking and listening. For example, Kate and Jason from Dr. Zhang’s first-semester class said,
trying to listen, if we had to learn characters too, no, I would probably [have] dropped it. (Kate, interview, December 9, 2010)
… Yes, should delay. First of all, westerners usually have no clue what to do when they see that [character], we are just lost. Also, when we are learning the spoken language, we kind of have to figure out how the word order goes. (Jason, interview, December 9, 2010) Kate’s statement is consistent with Dr. Zhang’s past observation that students tended to
discontinue CFL study if all aspects of learning plus culture were required in the first-semester class. In addition, both Kate and Jason pointed out existing difficulties in addition to character learning. Kate mentioned that she already struggled with tones, whereas Jason added that he also struggled with learning word order. In fact, the two aspects of tones and word order were also considered to be difficult for many other students.
The student who was not sure about the timing structure, Jim, was also in Dr. Zhang’s first-semester class. Interestingly, Jim pointed out another thought-provoking point in the following quotation:
Maybe, I know some people [he confirmed that there were three students] who I think said they decided they weren't gonna continue on coz they thought learning characters will be too difficult for them. They decided Chinese was too difficult, characters would be even worse, so...I am thinking maybe learning a few characters would be helpful, so you can kinda get an idea. (Jim, interview, December 9, 2010)
Surprisingly, the other six second-semester students indicated that they all wanted to learn characters earlier. There were two major reasons: first, they had a hard time associating what they learned in Pinyin to characters; and second, they felt it was a waste of time to learn the vocabulary in Pinyin and then have to re-learn it in characters. Moreover, these students
obviously gave much thought to this issue because they usually talked more about this aspect than others. For example, Elizabeth gave a long and detailed comment as follows:
No, we discussed this in class too. I think most of us thought that it was better to learn them all together. Then you kinda have an image to go with a word, phonetic image, and visual image of the actual character. We discussed it a couple of times with Dr. Mei. I think it was because a student said: why didn't we learn this before? and then just brought up the topic and we just all start to talk about it and how we would have preferred to have had, at least have been told to start recognizing the characters. At least when I took it 2 years ago, they never really asked you to look at the characters, even though they are right under the Pinyin or above the Pinyin. I think everybody said they would have preferred to have learned it from the start, or at least to have a little more emphasis on recognizing them at least.
The comment presented above not only revealed Elizabeth’s point of view but also reflected most of the other opinions expressed by Dr. Mei’s students interviewed. The commonly shared viewpoint was a reference for learning characters in the first-semester class. Elizabeth mentioned that, without characters in mind, she could not associate a word, Pinyin, and characters together. Like Elizabeth, Amy and Joe also gave similar comments:
They should teach us along with teaching the Pinyin and how to say it, because I didn't really associate with the characters as much as I should have in the first semester. I think if we had learned at least a little bit, kind of the basic understanding of how to use characters, it would have maybe [been] a little bit easier. (Amy, December 9, 2010) I learned character from day one, used Pinyin as supplementary things, but most like character and sound association, we didn't rely on Pinyin, like they do here, I thought it's
weird. 1001 students told me they only did Pinyin, once you get to 1002, we have to learn characters, it's harder, because you have to almost erase what you learned in 1001 and... (Joe, December 9, 2010)
Comments from Mei’s students demonstrate that the association is quite strong. Following is an interview dialogue between me and Tiffany (Interview, December 9, 2010):
Lijuan: In 1002, when you see a character, which do you think first when you see a sentence in characters?
Tiffany: Oh always, like in a test we took yesterday, when I looked at the sentence in Chinese, I had to go back and write it in Pinyin and then I had to go back and say this is what it means in English. That's horrible; I processed it twice in my head.
Lijuan: Why did you go to Pinyin?
Tiffany: Because that was the first thing I learned, so it's kinda ingrained in my head. Lijuan: So in 1001, you were trained to think from Pinyin to meaning, is that what you mean?
Tiffany: yes
Lijuan: So now, in 1002, you have to go through that route, from Pinyin to meaning, not from characters to meaning?
Tiffany: Nope, only, you know what's funny? The characters that I don't have to do that for are the characters I didn't learn the first semester. There are quite a few characters in the red book [the textbook used in the second-semester class] we didn't cover in the blue book [the textbook used in the first-semester class], so professor Mei would not even write those in Pinyin at all, she would just say that means...whatever...So those are the
ones that stick in my head that I just go directly to the sound and meaning without thinking of the Pinyin.
Her comments indicate that students seemed to have become dependent upon Pinyin in the first- semester class. The associations they developed with Pinyin are too strong to allow space for attention to characters. Tiffany was a motivated and top rated student. The dialogue illustrates that it was difficult for even this capable CFL learner to build associations between sound and character as well as between meaning and character. On the other hand, she also said that when